The History of Herons
(Malpas, Truro) What force is at work scripting this egg yolk, Sculpting the wet tangle of the shelled bird?…
The Rape of Europa
A million fields between Amsterdam and Berlin, sewn together by hedgerows and fences into a limitless skin that covers…
Extra-Curricular
When I was fourteen I lost my soul in the great depression of the Seventies it slipped away in…
Extract from Dr. Watson’s War
Chapter One: 221b Baker Street It was the smell of the place. The rooms that I’d agreed to take…
If Only You Knew I Can See You
On the twenty-fourth of February 1909 my husband decided to kill me. I like to believe he had thought…
A Country of Words
NON-FICTION: AUTOBIOGRAPHY A Country of Words: A Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page, Abdel-Bari Atwan,…
The Ekphrasis of Philip Gross and Simon Denison
POETRY I Spy Pinhole Eye, poems by Philip Gross; photographs by Simon Denison, Cinnamon Press, 80pp, £11.99 Poems which…
New Collections
POETRY ‘We needed coffee but…’, Matthew Welton, Carcanet, 96pp, £9.95 ‘Voyaging Out’, Peter Abbs, Salt, 80pp, £12.99 ‘As I…
Venice: Pure City
NON-FICTION: TRAVEL Venice: Pure City, Peter Ackroyd, Chatto & Windus, 416pp, £25 Venice is light. Her finest painters have…
London’s First Arab: ‘Abd-al-Wahid ‘Anuri’s
Six Months in the City On the 15th August 1600 a sixteen-man Embassy from an Arab country entered London…
Reading in Captivity
I am frequently asked what I missed most during the years of my captivity as a hostage in the…
Novels of the Recent Past
Suddenly, the 1990s seem an awfully long way off. Only a while back they were the stuff of recent…
Serious Anthony Powell
A sickly child, christened at haste, Anthony Powell was (so he tells us at the start of his memoirs)…
Abu Dhabi Globalises Culture
Abu Dhabi is a city created by decree and it is busy. The cobalt windows of its banks speak…
A Crisis of Brilliance: 1910 and the London
Art Scene In January 1910 Roger Fry had a chance encounter with a young married couple on the platform…
Herta Müller: Nobel Laureate 2009
Brigid Haines February / March 2010 Herta Müller: Nobel Laureate 2009 ‘who, with the concentration of poetry and the…
The Schumann Show
Two hundred years ago this February, baby Chopin’s fingers first reached out towards that famous Funeral March. Four months…
Poetry and Politics
Contemporary parliamentarians, in my experience, are not specially attuned to contemporary verse. There are significant exceptions. The former culture…
The Nightingale’s Song
George Beacham was a cattle doctor and a conjuror, a west-country cunning man. His house stood across the lane…
The Curious Case of Cricket and English
Literary Writing The historian George Trevelyan wrote that, if only the French lords had followed the example of their…
Outsleeping the Monsoon
In the purple foothills, the little hours run on light feet like spotted deer in the fallow dark leopard…
How the Snow-Leopard Became
We can barely detect them – Rauschenberg’s white paintings where the only surface interest is the shadow of passers-by…
The Blue Planet
Monks say that icons are written not painted, the gaze always recycled between mother and child. But today reading…
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